Magnitude 6.1 NEAR THE EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
This is what Reactor # 4 looked like before those quakes.
Image from 2 Strong Earthquakes Shake Japan, No Damage Reported
Posted on 12/12/2011 8:51:54 PM PST by TigerLikesRooster
SENTAKU MAGAZINE
Real cause of nuclear crisis
Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), the operator of the stricken Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Station, has been insisting that the culprit that caused the nuclear crisis was the huge tsunami that hit the plant after the March 11 earthquake. But evidence is mounting that the meltdown at the nuclear power plant was actually caused by the earthquake itself.
According to a science journalist well versed in the matter, Tepco is afraid that if the earthquake were to be determined as the direct cause of the accident, the government would have to review its quake-resistance standards completely, which in turn would delay by years the resumption of the operation of existing nuclear power stations that are suspended currently due to regular inspections.
The journalist is Mitsuhiko Tanaka, formerly with Babcock-Hitachi K.K. as an engineer responsible for designing the pressure vessel for the No. 4 reactor at the ill-fated Fukushima nuclear plant.
(Excerpt) Read more at japantimes.co.jp ...
P!
I remember the scandal with all the mercury in their water and fish, with HORRIBLE results to their people and children. They knew that ahead of time too.
The Japanese government made decisions. The Japanese have to live with those decisions. It's not "mother nature's" fault; it's the fault of those politicos who said: BUILD IT THERE.
“...evidence is mounting that the meltdown at the nuclear power plant was actually caused by the earthquake itself.”
What evidence?
I remember at the time just after the earthquake the reactors were in the process of shutting down. Then a huge wall of water overswept the entire facility, knocking cooling water pumps off of skids and breaking steam and coolant water lines. With coolant water pumps no longer operable and water lines no longer connected, there would be no way for a controlled shutdowns to proceed.
“...evidence is mounting that the meltdown at the nuclear power plant was actually caused by the earthquake itself.”
What evidence?
I remember at the time just after the earthquake the reactors were in the process of shutting down. Then a huge wall of water overswept the entire facility, knocking cooling water pumps off of skids and breaking steam and coolant water lines. With coolant water pumps no longer operable and water lines no longer connected, there would be no way for a controlled shutdowns to proceed.
Someone gave the go-ahead to build that plant near the ocean, which experiences earthquake-generated tsunamis all the time. I am SHOCKED.
Just shocked.
Japan is an archipelago of islands and nuke plants are ususally built near water - river, lake, ocean - due to the need for cooling water and producing steam.
What puzzles Tanaka most is why the emergency condensers, which turn vaporized coolant (steam) into water and are supposed to lower both the pressure and temperature of the reactor, were not operating at the time of the accident although the condensers have the capability of functioning even when electricity becomes unavailable.
It is highly probable, he says, that the plumbing linked with the condensers was damaged by the earthquake, causing water or vapor to leak out, thus leading to the nonfunctioning of the condensers.
This report says the IC was closed off by an operator.
Since that refutes this scientist’s argument I’d hold off on conclusions.
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/genpatsu-fukushima/20111206/1910_reikyaku.htmlreikyaku.html Suspecting that it caused a delay in the response to the accident, the NISA investigated and heard witnesses in August on the question whether plant managers had mistakenly believed unit 1’s isolation condenser was running while it was not. The results of the NISA’s investigation were publicly released on 6 December : the managers were not aware that a plant operator had closed the IC’s valve, and it is 8 hours after the earthquake, after 11 PM, after knowing that the radiation inside reactor building was rising, that they first grasped the IC status. It is possible that this caused a delay in the response to the accident.
I had read that international scientists disagreed with the Japanese in that the international scientists say that radiation was released into the environment and detected prior to the arrival of the tsunami. Paired with that were some reports by workers that they heard noises and thought some pipes had burst.
TEPCO ignored warnings about the tsunami potential and built on seismically active zones to begin with so I do believe they are responsible - not earthquakes or tsunamis but bad decision making.
“I personally saw pipes that came apart and I assume that there were many more that had been broken throughout the plant. There’s no doubt that the earthquake did a lot of damage inside the plant,” he said. “There were definitely leaking pipes, but we don’t know which pipes – that has to be investigated. I also saw that part of the wall of the turbine building for Unit 1 had come away. That crack might have affected the reactor.”
“It felt like the earthquake hit in two waves, the first impact was so intense you could see the building shaking, the pipes buckling, and within minutes, I saw pipes bursting. Some fell off the wall. Others snapped. I was pretty sure that some of the oxygen tanks stored on site had exploded but I didn’t see for myself. Someone yelled that we all needed to evacuate and I was good with that. But I was severely alarmed because as I was leaving I was told and I could see that several pipes had cracked open, including what I believe were cold water supply pipes. That would mean that coolant couldn’t get to the reactor core. If you can’t sufficiently get the coolant to the core, it melts down. You don’t have to have to be a nuclear scientist to figure that out.”
“As he was heading to his car, he could see the walls of the reactor one building itself had already started to collapse. “There were holes in them. In the first few minutes, no one was thinking about a tsunami. We were thinking about survival.”
“After the second shockwave hit, I heard a loud explosion that was almost deafening. I looked out the window and I could see white smoke coming from reactor one.”
When the worker got to the office five to 15 minutes later the supervisor ordered them all to evacuate, explaining, “there’s been an explosion of some gas tanks in reactor one, probably the oxygen tanks. In addition to this there has been some structural damage, pipes have burst, meltdown is possible. Please take shelter immediately.”
Excerpted from The Goal Of TEPCO’s Meltdown Analysis
Magnitude 6.1 NEAR THE EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
This is what Reactor # 4 looked like before those quakes.
Image from 2 Strong Earthquakes Shake Japan, No Damage Reported
Thanks for posting that incredible photo - I’ve never seen it before. To think that this kind of destroyed structure is what is holding the spent fuel pool, and with it the ability for workers to remain in the area to maintain all the other spent fuel pools, intact!
Now there is a story right now on the progressive anti-nuke blogs circulating that some inside intel source has stated that the support for that pool is failing, but that is just an unsubstantiated rumor with no news report supporting the claim. Only blogs. You can find those blogs by searching google for [Fukushima reactor 4 collapse]. Those appear to be alarmist blogs that are wrong as much as they are right on this topic.
Hard to deprogram someone who doesn’t want to be deprogrammed.
In ensuing days, all those press conferences by TEPCO saying this, that and the other thing while 3 units were already melting down, leaking, blowing up, getting cooling from a fire hose then an air drop of seawater. If that doesn’t inspire confidence, I don’t what will.
If I recall correctly, only Unit 1 (the oldest model unit) had a stand alone back up condenser for emergency cooling and even that needed water added to it after a few hours to keep it functional. With leaking pipes it was futile. Units 2 & 3 with newer backup cooling designs relied on battery backup powered sensors and automatic valves and pumps for emergency cooling. Without power, valves had to be turned manually and some were as workers put their lives on the line as radiation was being emitted.
Then there were the tall stacks to vent off overpressure and radioactive gases, they only work when they have power and the plumbing is intact. The Great Quake took the grid out and caused one of those tall transmission towers to fall over during the quake not far from the plant.
Situation was hopeless.
And recent reports of elements still being produced that indicate that one or all the blobs (corium) are still reacting on their own (called criticality or re-criticality).
I tend to agree Satin, you can’t have that degree of water taking out what it did and expect normal shut down operations to be functional.
The reactors at Fukushima were GE BWR(boiling water reactors) technology from the late 1950s-early 1960s. I’m not familiar with GE reactors, only the Westinghouse PWR (presurized water reactors) and those from the late 1960s-early 1970s.
The PWR have a failsafe mechnaism that immediately drops rods into the reactor to stop the fissioning process whenever an earthquake is detedted. I do no know whether there is a similair falisafe mechanism on BWRs. Do you happen to know if Fukushima was equipped with such a system?
And do you happen to know if Fukushima was licensed to operate by the AEC (predessesor of the NRC). Many overseas nuclear power plants are licensed by our regulatory agency - many people don’t know that fact.
The difference between the PWR and the BWR is that control rods drop from the top of the PWR.
Control rods are inserted from the bottom up on a BWR using gas (nitrogen) driven hydraulics.
A couple of GE engineers in the early stages of designing the BWR quit in protest claiming it was a extremely poor method of inserting control rods in an emergency (versus gravity fed in the PWR along with all the necessary ‘holes’ needs for the control rods to pass through on the bottom of a RPV). The engineers went on to be anti-nuke activists.
If I can find a picture to post of the bottom of an actual BWR during manufacturing or being installed, you will see that it is an accident waiting to happen as it looks like a sieve and each of the many ‘holes’ requires a seal that could fail and leak.
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